That Assassin’s Creed: Egypt made its modern frame-story protagonist a probably lesbian keffiyeh-wearing circuitbender, eh
yeah, 2018, she’s still cis tho
that Ubisoft made her a Final Fantasy fangirl with Press-X-to-gaze-upon-this Cactrot and Moogle gear feels radically transgressive
Assassin’s Creed: Egypt is so brilliant (like literally, color-wise) with these jewel tone pastels it makes me wonder if they back-formed it from Miami Deco, or whether that came from some pulse of Egyptomania
Playing through the whole series it’s impressive how they clearly cue a ranking of impressiveness in Great Cities of the World independent of how “modern” they are, like Ptolemaic Alexandria and 1500-era Constantinople are first rank; then you have Revolutionary Paris and Victorian London and Renaissance Rome; then Colonial Philadelphia and Crusader Jerusalem are like what and Kingston, Jamaica is a joke
Played through Far Cry:Montana. It was fun, but even as someone who worries about American collapse and has thought about moving to a compound in Montana and/or founding a cult it wasn’t essential
(the online “ARCADE” user-edited levels are a rush of Duke Nukem nostalgia tho)
So taking a mulligan and getting AC:Egypt. I’d asked which of “the two” AC strains it was, based on climbing (one button/two) and fighting (combos/medicine attrition)
But then I do the first fight and visually (and mechanically at a kindergarten level) it’s a Dark Souls reference, but I see damage numbers popping up on hit and I see something about legendary quality weapons and
OHH SHIT, it’s the return of the MMORPG style from AC:France
Getting to the point where I can key off design fads to recognize the staffs cycling across Ubisoft franchises as well as I used to be able with ‘90s-2000s Square
The shift in console games from purchasing physical discs at GameStop to downloading has only reified the “gratuitously long tutorial area, esp. for a franchise I’ve played 8 times before” trend, cause now there’s a reason to set up a bit playable halfway through the download that’ll occupy you until the rest finishes
I wonder how far optimizing for that pushes back the release of the physical gold master
Is “gold master” still a relevant term, or has it been superseded by the language of “commit”s and “push”es?
Ended up getting Far Cry: Montana.
1hr in: yeah that was some bullshit complaining, there are black guys in Montana and these are exactly the Montana kind – buncha Death Grips-looking wild men and a 2010s-ass pastor from the city who leads opposition to the powers that be
2hrs in: yeah okay fair there’s not that many black guys in Montana
3hrs in: there’s a lot of native guys though, how come I haven’t seen anyone with Oklahoma braids yet?
Well, “more Far Cry” is what I wanted and it’s what I got. Relative to 4 it’s been polished further towards the Unified Open World Genre - more vehicle focus, “collect X to upgrade Y” stuff folded back into a perk-buy system, Just Cause-style wingsuit inserts on fast travel, NPC allies
I think a lot of that’s just improving mobility in the face of an even larger map, but it makes verticality (that used to be a real challenge and constraining structure) a lot more boring, while distance just gets tedious. Also combat’s been eased a bit - enough spare ammo you aren’t constantly swapping types, more corners to run around and regenerate health, with the allies it’s a lot easier to berzerk your way through an outpost capture.
In general it feels like they’ve traded a more intense game for just more game.
The plotting/“direction” continues to be decent - fun set pieces and solid “voice” (and voice acting) for a lot of colorful characters, the Seeds are good heirs to the Vaas/Pagan Min tradition of building compellingly charismatic madness by taking recognizable motivational speaker-style idioms of the empowered self and overclocking them.
Ended up getting Far Cry: Montana.
1hr in: yeah that was some bullshit complaining, there are black guys in Montana and these are exactly the Montana kind – buncha Death Grips-looking wild men and a 2010s-ass pastor from the city who leads opposition to the powers that be
2hrs in: yeah okay fair there’s not that many black guys in Montana
3hrs in: there’s a lot of native guys though, how come I haven’t seen anyone with Oklahoma braids yet?
“Leisure Suit Larry was just the first game[…] to participate in the joke. Suddenly there was a game that would respond humorously to your shenanigans instead of replying with clinical bafflement. When you tried to screw someone (or everyone) the game understood your intent and explained why you couldn’t. Just having the game correctly parse these crude actions was a punchline all by itself. The fact that it followed up with a humorous reply was just gravy.”— This Dumb Industry: Lost Laughs in Leisure Suit Larry - Twenty Sided
In the mood for another Ubisoft open world OCD checklist simulator. Should I get Far Cry: Montana or Assassin’s Creed: Egypt?
Wait is Egypt one of the “climbing takes two buttons and you grind out fighting with medicine potions” or one of the “just hold the climb button and run up a wall, fight by maintaining an unbroken combo chain” Creeds?
me, 2008: oh huh the whole FF6 deal with Cyan and Gestahl and Kefka was obviously about Japan and the Kaiser and the Führer, and it’s a pretty exculpatory telling, but realizing the poisoning of Doma and the Shadow Train farewell were about the real trauma of mass death in nuclear war sure adds depth
me, 2018: oh huh and the Tower of Zozo was a Led Zeppelin joke
Are Aya and Maya Brea (of Parasite Eve) named after the La Brea tar pits?
The PE1 level design makes total sense if someone only ever went to the tar pit museum in LA and saw the skeletons and then only read a (room-by-room) description of the Natural History Museum in NYC
Kinda like how Silent Hill was a Japanese take on New England horror and it all looked like small town PNW
one thing about playing military FPSes, not even the ridiculousness of 64 v 64 matches where you run all around the battlefield like a maniac – that’s thinking as a (lower) fighter instead of thinking like a soldier
it’s the way they bake in regular death – by level design you can’t claim enough territory to win without spreading yourself too thin to cover every approach
it makes you think like a (higher) commander instead of thinking like a soldier, treating your life as a disposable resource to be well-spent – I have very often committed to a course of action I totally expect to end in death that would give my “side” a marginal advantage I calculate worth it
easily one in every 20 of my vidya deaths would be worth a Medal of Honor (basically, “he took initiative to do something critically useful he couldn’t reasonably expect to survive”), which is absurdly out of line with any attested war, even if you double the rate to factor in the doomed ones with no surviving friendly witnesses
the heavy-handed political message of Detroit: Become Human is disgusting in addition to being an utterly wasted opportunity
the message isn’t just “racism is bad”
it’s “this racism, which we made to be not tempting at all and only be held by repulsive people, is bad, because you already believe it is”
It’s a fucking Daily Show episode. It’s an ideological handjob: The things you already believe make you a perfect, wise, moral person, you never need to think about anything. You don’t need to think about the all-consuming nature of prejudice and how it pops up unhindered in people who swear to be free of it. You don’t need to think about how little about your life would have to change to make you think racism was the obviously correct viewpoint with exactly as much smugness. You don’t need to think about who you are prejudiced against. You just need to bask in the smug self-satisfaction that you know Racism Is Bad, and people who disagree with you about anything are stupid and repulsive. Like these guys who spend thousands of dollars on consumer electronics in the form of androids, and are then are so overwhelmed by the need to be stupid and repulsive they have to savagely beat their own expensive androids. Not like you! You’re smart, not like the stupid and repulsive people who disagree with you. *handjob noises*
The deck is so stacked in favor of the androids it kills the message. The androids don’t “become human”, they already are. Kara and Markus behave identically to humans the moment they need to.
Hey, wouldn’t it make sense if the androids were weird, and weird to be around? Like they didn’t have the program to navigate the situations they found themselves in, and they had to cobble one together from what data they have? What if Kara literally had no way to talk to anyone other than “like a housekeeper or nanny”, no matter how inappropriate this was or how much it freaked people out to hear her cobble together sentences out of phrases that were not meant to be used that way? What if she was on the run with Alice and in a constant state of terror that she’s going to encounter a situation she just Cannot Deal With that a human wouldn’t even notice?
What if deviant androids weren’t “runaway slaves”, who everyone agrees were human and should have been treated nicer, they were the mentally ill, who almost every person crusading against racism is gleefully prejudiced against? What if instead of jerking the audience off about how not prejudiced they were, you instead showed them how prejudiced they were, by presenting characters who are like people they actually hate, instead of like people they gain status for pitying?
I was nodding along from the first line thinking “how could you write a better racism analogy” and your last paragraph took me completely by surprise, that would have been such a better way to do it.
Tbh, David Cage-style “Press X to Shaun” gameplay could probably work if applied in a less silly way and/or to situations that weren’t meant to be deadly serious. Like, imagine if it was being applied to slapstick comedies instead of Very Serious Stories about coping with the loss of your son(s) or being a robot who is a metaphor for slavery. It would still be ridiculous, but that ridiculousness would be in service to the concept instead of being at odds with it.
Kingdom Come’s “a small number of rewarding graves that require a 4lb, useless-for-anything-else spade to dig up” is more oldschool CRPG trad than its hunger or drunkenness meters OR I-just-had-sex bonuses
Got a new PS4 controller so I can actually make R2 attacks, so I’m back on that Kingdom Come tip
“Visegrad backwater feudalism RPG” is absolutely my new favorite microgenre, Witcher III’s Grimm rural commoner take on Poland and Scotland just warmed me up to run through the wildflower fields of Kingdom Come’s, uh,
(me: don’t say “Bohemian rhapsody”
also me: ABSOLUTELY say “Bohemian rhapsody”)
uhh, Czech fantasy*
like, you advance the quest I’m on now by understanding the economic geography of charcoal burning, ::swoon::
*if you think that was bad, you shoulda seen the drafts where I was still trying to wedge in a reference to the historical setting as “Bad King Wenceslas”
On the Visegrad populist medieval fantasy CRPG tip, still playing Kingdom Come but I was startled what they did with one character, they first did some encounters to set him up as an antagonist like “arrogant feckless young nobleman”, like the archetype of the Bad King (-in-waiting)
…but then subvert that towards that he’s not rotten, and actually pretty charming and competent, and it’s mostly that he’s fresh to the role and under stress and a lot of his schtick is basically ballbusting but at the end of the day he is an entitled lord and you are an undistinguished commoner and he’s not at all ashamed of the dynamic
That’s interesting, I hadn’t seen it before, and it’s a way these Eastern European feudalism-from-below narratives really are novel
The now-ubiquitous vidya “explosions ragdoll toss you” trope is a better reflection of cinema stuntwork than of real life, where explosions dismember you and ragdoll toss your components
